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peculiar gesture - the impossibility of community. A community is not a project
of fusion, or in some general way a productive or operative project - nor is it a
project at all (once again, this is its radical difference from 'the spirit of a people',
which from Hegel to Heidegger has figured the collectivity as project, and
figured the project, reciprocally, as collective - which does not mean that we can
ignore the question of the singularity of a 'people').
A community is the presentation to its members of their mortal truth (which
amounts to saying that there is no community of immortal beings: one can
imagine either a society or a communion of immortal beings, but not a
community). It is the presentation of the finitude and the irredeemable excess
that make up finite being: its death, but also its birth, and only the community
can present me my birth, and along with it the impossibility of my reliving it, as
well as the impossibility of my crossing over into my death. [ ... 1
Community means, consequently, that there is no singular being without
another singular being, and that there is, therefore, what might be called, in a
rather inappropriate idiom, an originary or ontological 'sociality' that in its
principle extends far beyond the simple theme of man as a social being (the zoon
politikon is secondary to this community). For, on the one hand, it is not obvious
that the community of singularities is limited to 'man' and excludes, for
example, the 'animal' (even in the case of 'man' it is not afortiori certain that this
community concerns only 'man' and not also the 'inhuman' or the 'superhuman',
or, for example, if I may say so with and without a certain Witz, 'woman': after
all, the difference befween the sexes is itself a singularity in the difference of
singularities). On the other hand, if social being is always posited as a predicate
of man, community would signify on the contrary the basis for thinking only
something like 'man'. But this thinking would at the same time remain
dependent upon a principal determination of community, namely, that there is
no communion of singularities in a totality superior to them and immanent to
their common being.
In place of such a communion, there is communication. Which is to say; in
very precise terms, that finitude itself is nothing; it is neither a ground, nor an
essence, nor a substance. But it appears, it presents itself, it exposes itself, and
thus it exists as communication. In order to designate this singular mode of
appearing, this specific phenomenality, which is no doubt more originary than
any other (for it could be that the world appears to the community, not to the
individual), we would need to be able to say that finitude co-appears or
compears, (com-parait) and can only compear: in this formulation we would need
to hear that finite being always presents itself 'together', hence severally; for
finitude always presents itself in being-in-common and as this being itself, and
66/ /THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS